Direct economic costs related to antimicrobial resistance in bloodstream infections isolated from newborns in a perinatal hospital in Peru.

Background: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has emerged as a priority for both public health and the global economy. Moreover, information on AMR is scarce, particularly in low/middle-income countries. We evaluated the direct economic cost of microorganisms and AMR.

Role of mobile health in the care of culturally and linguistically diverse US populations.

Emerging trends in the health-related use of cell phones include the proliferation of mobile health applications for the care and monitoring of patients with chronic diseases and the rise in cell phone usage by Latinos and African Americans in the United States. This article reviews public policy in four areas with the goal of improving the care of patients belonging to culturally and linguistically diverse populations: 1) mobile health service access and the physician's duty of care, 2) affordability of and reimbursement for health related services via mobile phone, 3) protocols for mobile health enabled patient health data collection and distribution, and 4) cultural and linguistic appropriateness of health related messages delivered via cell phone. The review demonstrates the need for policy changes that would allow for reimbursement of both synchronous and asynchronous patient-provider communication, subsidize broadband access for lower-income patients, introduce standards for confidentiality of health data transmitted via cell phone as well as amplify existing cultural and linguistic standards to encompass mobile communication, and consider widespread public accessibility when certifying new technologies as "medical devices.

Development and validation of a patient-reported measure of physician cultural competency.

While cultural competency is widely promoted, the lack of a measure of cultural competency limits our ability to evaluate interventions and to understand the effects of cultural competency on health care quality. Based on a conceptual framework of cultural competency derived from expert focus groups, we developed a patient-reported measure of physician culturally competent communication behaviors that we validated in a group of 429 adult primary-care patients with diabetes and/or hypertension and their 53 physicians. Construct validity was supported by a moderate association with both patient satisfaction (r = .

Development and evaluation of a cultural competency training curriculum.

Background: Increasing the cultural competence of physicians and other health care providers has been suggested as one mechanism for reducing health disparities by improving the quality of care across racial/ethnic groups. While cultural competency training for physicians is increasingly promoted, relatively few studies evaluating the impact of training have been published.

Methods: We recruited 53 primary care physicians at 4 diverse practice sites and enrolled 429 of their patients with diabetes and/or hypertension.